Harvard Scientists Stuff Over 700TB of Data Into a Single Gram of DNA

Science and technology have always been close bedfellows, however sometimes scientist’s dream up new technologies that completely and utterly change everything. A pair of engineers at Harvard have been doing just that, and amazingly, have found a way to store around 704TB of data in a single gram of DNA. I re-read the findings of George Church and Sri Kosuri several times, but it took a while to finally grasp the concept that the entire contents of my NAS could be stored on the surface area of my pinky finger.

Scientists have been looking at the possibility of using DNA as a storage platform for years now because of its density, and also because it’s so stable. The issue however has always been with sequencing and reading the data, a problem that has at least partially been solved by recent developments in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip.

Church and Kosuri have posted a 6 minute video attempting to describe the technology in laymen’s terms, but also speculate openly about the possibilities of a future where data storage is nearly infinite, and human progress can be documented and stored in HD for all eternity. We have to admit that the prospect of this is both terrifying, and amazing. It will probably still be many years (if ever) before we will get our hands on something like this, but it’s great to see people are still dreaming of the world beyond mechanical and SSD storage.

Comments

All the scientists have said that transporter technology would be impossible to build because the storage of all the atoms of your body would take up huge amounts of space.
Well, with this technology, maybe a map of all the atoms of your body could be stored on something as big as a CD.

i'm stoked about this but it makes me wonder. if we can figure out how to put digital content into dna how come we cat "figure out" how to cure aids or other massively killing disease's makes you kinda wonder what is being hidden from us just to make money.

AIDS hasn't been cured yet because no one has found a way to effectively remove the integrated virus genome from infected t-cells. This is hard to do, because a drug must be able to find infected cells in a person's body, then pass through cell membranes, and finally be able to recognize specific foreign DNA fragments from a rapidly mutating virus. In addition, the drug has to be protected from being broken down through normal metabolic processes.

Because putting content into DNA digitally is not that hard. Granted what this scientists did is impressive, but its impressive in its size not because it is new. Hell even a couple years ago a group of scientists made an E.coli cell genome using only a computer and free nucleotides (and obviously the machinery to synthesize the nucleotides in the right sequence) and input all their e-mails and phone numbers on it for kicks.

As for why we can't figure out AIDS, well to put it simply: its because its hard. Like really hard. Here you have something that makes the person's body completely helpless.

As for why we haven't conquered other massively killing diseases, we have. It wasn't easy and took a shit load of time, but we can say that apart for 2 vials (one in the US and one in Russia) smallpox has been completely eradicated.

LOL, without violating certain terms of disclosure. First there are way more than 2 vials. Second there are more than just Russia and US. The biggest storage area (and my data is old) in the world for smallpox is in another country...... ahem: cough cough....Let's just say this nation has a penchant for wine, cheese, art, and cognac oddly enough. I'm sure you can connect the dots. The weird thing I don't understand is why they keep so much of it on hand in storage. What's the purpose? Weird...

I would bet that somewhere out there buried in the ruins of Sumeria or something, that there is a record for us to find someday that has information using this very method, because this method of storing data is so straight forward and simple, one would thing it would be like a 'universal thumb drive' almost. I read that it can be viable for over 100,000 years.

Even James Bond never had a microchip he could hide on his thumbnail that had small data center's worth of data.

well if we could store our own data in bacteria and then send it into a person or test subject it would replicate and copy the data tremendously. then we could have an infinite amount of "RAM" theoretically by using a single bacteria as RAM and it replicating itself tons of times.

Would give a whole new meaning to Thumb Drives! What was that movie where the guy who plays Bill from Bill and Ted stores all the info in his head? If I remember it was really a small amount compared to terabytes of data now-a-days.

Edit: Johnny Mnemonic and he was able to hold 160G of data in his implant.

Interesting, this had me Googling isolinear chips earlier, but I see your point. The scientists do note however that storing stuff in living cells is a bit more complicated. Suppose it won't take long to solve that barrier though.